NEWS
By Sloane Brown | September 27, 2009
With a James Bond party theme, it was no wonder the Hyatt Regency ballroom looked like a movie set. The room was swagged in white chiffon, with clusters of white couches and cube tables along the sides. Red velvet ropes cordoned off the back third of the room, which was elevated for the VIP section. "There's a bottle of vodka on every table here," said real estate developer Patrick Turner, noting the VIP bottle service. No set would be complete without its stars. And there were plenty, thanks to host Baltimore Ravens player Terrell Suggs.
NEWS
April 13, 2007
M. CARROLL RAVER, writer, photographer, cinematographer and film director, died Monday April, 9th. He was 67. A native of Carroll County, Md., he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where he was a National Collegiate Athletic Association champion fencer. Early in his career, while at J. Walter Thompson Advertising (NY), he served as a copywriter, producer and director working on television commercials for national clients including Ford. Later, as an award-winning director and cameraman, he directed commercials for Hertz, General Motors, the U.S. Army, BMW and others.
NEWS
By Michael Sragow | September 22, 2006
A celebrated writer doesn't always have the makings of a writer-director. Steven Zaillian earned his reputation as a screenwriter with Schindler's List, but as a writer-director his work is often clumsy or simplistic; even at the script stage, it's as if he's writing down to his limited powers as a film director, or else, as a director, is not getting whatever life or complexity he has on the page. In Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), his writing-directing debut, Zaillian sheared away the fascinating, complicated mesh of real-life characters in Fred Waitzkin's autobiographical book about being the parent of a chess prodigy, and constructed a hollow fairytale about the need to lead a free, well-rounded life.
NEWS
By Chris Kaltenbach | December 1, 2004
Here's probably the only fact you need to know about JimmyO and April Monique Burril: They were married on Halloween 1998 in costume. She was dressed as some sort of demented fairy-type thing, he as a werewolf. Need another fact? Try this one: They've made a movie together, Chainsaw Sally, that has nothing to do with chopping wood. Yep, they're one of those couples. "In this neighborhood, we're definitely the weirdos on the corner," says April, 32, chatting amiably at the dining-room table of their Perryville home, an unassuming end-of-the-row duplex a stone's heave from where the Susquehanna River flows through town.
NEWS
By Chris Kaltenbach | September 3, 2003
The luckiest day in Federico Fellini's life may have been the day the circus sent him packing. Fellini, the subject of a month-long film series beginning tonight at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown, was only 7 at the time, and the middle-class life his parents had made for themselves in the small Italian village of Rimini wasn't doing it for him. Like many kids, he dreamed of something more exciting, more splendid, more colorful. So he ran away from his boarding school and linked up with a traveling circus for a life of clowns and jugglers and animals and people who in their day would have been called freaks.
NEWS
By GREGORY KANE | May 7, 2003
MICHAEL Johnson stood before the crowd in one of two theaters in the Heritage CinemaPlex on Taylor Avenue and recalled the time he was a film student at that other University of Maryland - the one near Washington, D.C. "The teacher said we were going to watch the greatest film ever made," Johnson said. "I was right off Park Heights, so I figured we were going to be watching Superfly or Shaft. It turned out the film this teacher had in mind was Birth of a Nation." D.W. Griffith's epic 1915 tale of the Civil War and Reconstruction revolutionized the art of filmmaking, pioneering many techniques in use today.
NEWS
January 24, 2003
Linda Goldenberg, a motion picture marketing and publicity executive and former Baltimore resident, died of cancer Monday at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 57. Mrs. Goldenberg, a Los Angeles resident, had been president of marketing for the Premiere Marketing and Distribution Group there since 2001. Born Linda Schwartz in Philadelphia and raised in Baltimore, she was a 1959 graduate of Forest Park High School. She began her career as a secretary for Jack Fruchtman Sr., owner of JF Theaters, one of the largest movie chains in Maryland.
NEWS
December 23, 1999
Robert Bresson, 98, a film director who helped redefine French cinema by focusing on images rather than dialogue, died Saturday in Paris. He was best known for his austere approach and helping pave the way for the New Wave movement.The son of a military officer who once studied to be a painter, he often used untrained actors and coached them to speak in monotones. In the 1959 film "Pickpocket," widely regarded as his best film, Mr. Bresson pared down the compulsive art of lifting wallets to its barest psychological elements.
NEWS
By John Coffren | August 8, 1999
When the call came in March 1995, Sara Maitland thought it was a prank. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as film director Stanley Kubrick, and asked, "Would you like to write a film script for me?""He rang me, no warning," the British author recalls. "I called up my agent and said, 'What do you mean giving up my private phone?' "But the call and offer were both genuine. The next day a contract arrived, beginning Maitland's yearlong adventure as the screenwriter for "A.I."
NEWS
By Fred Rasmussen | February 8, 1998
Stephen M. Milius, an award-winning film director and editor who directed hundreds of commercials and corporate videos during his nearly 25-year career, died Monday from complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver.Milius, who was 48 and lived in Owings Mills, was awaiting a lung transplant when he died.Since 1993, Mr. Milius had been associated with Big Shot Productions in Baltimore, where he planned and directed a variety of videos and films, including commercials, corporate-industrial training videos and infomercials.